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Geoffrey K. Pullum at Language Log explains how usage of the singular “they” works and why it is grammatically sound. The discussion was prompted by a statement made by President Obama during the Henry Louis Gates affair in Cambridge last year. Obama said:
. . . the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home.
Pullum explains:
Obama was trying to make a general claim about the stupidity of arresting some person x when there was already proof that x was in x‘s own home. The x in this paraphrase is intended as what a logician would call a bound variable. The issue at hand is which pronoun to use when expressing the same content in English. Now, Obama wasn’t intending to limit himself to the claim that arresting Professor Gates was stupid. Doubtless he would think that arresting Harvard president Drew Faust in her own home, if she got snippy after she had shown her driver’s license, would also be stupid — unless she had clearly committed an arrestable crime. And in contemporary Standard English, with antecedents like somebody or everyone or any citizen, people typically use the pronoun they for “bound variable” meanings in this sort of syntactic situation.
Strunk and White baldly assert that this is an error. They simply say don’t use they with syntactically singular antecedents like somebody. They don’t give a reason; and it is pretty clear they didn’t know anything much about the literary evidence that they has been grammatical and normal with singular antecedents for six or seven centuries. Strunk and White are just wrong about Standard English syntax, here as nearly everywhere else where they deal with grammar in their book The Elements of Style.
Of course, you have a perfect right to hold the opinion that they with a singular antecedent seems distasteful or ugly to you. In that case I would advise you not to use it. But don’t call it a grammatical error, because it clearly isn’t one, and never has been. Don’t say that it betokens a breakdown in our ability to tell singular from plural, because it doesn’t.
(Formatting in original.) So, the next time someone gets snooty about singular “they,” you can tell them that they are out of touch with six or seven hundred years’ worth of accepted usage.
Les Mots Justes
Austin Frakt‘s mom, through back-channel comments, lays her finger on the only really practical way to treat the plural possessive of attorney general: avoid it at all cost.
My wife Nina agrees and further buttresses the strategic avoidance paradigm by pointing out that the phrase bogus arguments of the attorneys general follows the way the plural possessive is formed in French. That’s fitting, since it was the French-speaking Normans’ conquest of Britain in 1066 that got us into this fix in the first place. If we’re gonna follow the French rule for forming the plural, attorneys general, we might as well follow their rule for forming the plural possessive: of the attorneys general.
I also like the suggestion of switching into acronym mode, à la the AGs’ bogus arguments—as baseball fans do with RBIs for runs batted in—though I’m sure purists will have none of it. For them, just as you can end a season with one RBI or 190 RBI, you can file a bogus lawsuit with one AG or 50 AG. Because sticklers are like that.
Stay tuned for the denouement of this gripping series about plural possessives, in which we’ll visit the “in-laws” and learn whether I’m totally wrong about attorneys general’s.
Weekend Wordery: Nerdery
At last, from Great White Snark, a Venn diagram taxonomy of geekdom. Hat tip to Austin Frakt, who also earns his stripes by laying out the following preference hierarchy, in which I concur:
Since I prefer intelligence overall, think obsession has good, secondary value and find little to be recommended in social ineptitude but will accept it if required to support the first two, here’s the preference hierarchy, as I see it:
- Geek,
- Nerd,
- Dweeb,
- Dork.
Weekend Wordery/Birdery: Ornithology Metaphors
Since I did non-weekend birdery this week, it’s a good time for a double whammy weekend birdery and wordery post.
Somebody else’s post, that is. Neil Sinhababu (a month ago, but so what?) wonders if the hawks and doves trope hasn’t gone too far. Maybe so, but I welcome the introduction of the term “peacock” into the political taxonomy. Deficit peacocks, for instance, are those politicos who make ostentatious displays of being aggressive critics of the country’s budget deficit but whose policy stances are basically indistinguishable from those of ordinary partisan hacks. In other words, they’re all show.
Weekend Wordery: “Realism”
Matt Yglesias is right. Legal realism is pretty much the opposite of philosophical realism. In philosophy, realism is basically the position that the world is not mind-dependent. In legal theory, realism (usually qualified as “legal realism” for this reason, I think) means that the law is mind-dependent. So, legal realism is associated with the cynical view that the law is whatever the judge says it is.
Yglesias also notes that people who don’t go to law school are invariably legal realists, which I suppose is probably true. I’d also note that, apart from the theoretically minded, high-achieving law students who go on to become law professors, practically all law students are legal realists. Which means that almost all lawyers are, too.
I’ve worked around the terminological confusion by simply boycotting the term—which is hopelessly two-dimensional anyway. Pragmatism, in law and in philosophy, captures the helpful insights of realism within a framework that is grounded in constructive and socially aware thinking about three-dimensional problems in a three-dimensional world.
Weekend Wordery: “On the Table”
Here’s something to ponder.
When you are actively negotiating for or over something, that something is said to be “on the table.” But in the context of legislative business (in American English, at least), “tabling” something means removing that thing from present consideration. E.g., “Let’s table that amendment till next session.”
Conference table at Potsdam, 1945
I’m often confused by the latter meaning of ‘table’ because it clashes with the more the accessible mental image I associate with the former meaning: people sitting around a table, negotiating over some papers on the table between them. It seems to me that “tabling” the papers should mean laying them on the table, and that if you wanted to remove them from discussion, you would take the papers off the table .
Apparently I’m not alone in this confusion. Sanjay Srivastava suggests a way to keep the imagery straight: think of a second table in the corner where you place discarded items. Also, it helps just to be cognizant of the conflict.
Further complicating the matter, though, in British English ‘to table’ something means to propose it for consideration—a meaning which does comport with my mental image. I guess that makes ‘table’ a word that is an antonym of itself, a contranym. Like ‘sanction’: meaning both to permit and to punish. It’s also further evidence that George Bernard Shaw was right. Britain and America are two countries separated by a common language.
What’s in a Name: “Homosexuals” Edition
Remember the polling that showed how Americans’ negative attitude toward anything labeled with the word ‘tax’ flips when you change the label to ‘offset’? Well, now you can do the same trick with ‘homosexuals’ in the military:
Just 44 percent of Americans support “homosexuals” serving openly in the military, if you use the word “homosexuals.” But change that word to “gay men and lesbians” and the poll flips–suddenly 58 percent of the same sample poll sample suddenly support this group serving openly in the military. In other words, perhaps 14 percent of Americans don’t want “homosexuals” to serve openly in the military, but are happy to have “gay men and lesbians” in the same positions.
Via Michael Scherer at Swampland.
Paradox Watch
Sen. Mary Landrieu seems to have consulted Eubulides for her PR campaign in defense of the Senate bill’s special Medicaid funding for her home state of Louisiana.
“The fact that this is a secret is a lie,” she said. Hmmm.
Story at Politico.
What’s in a Name
Forget “excise tax” and “surtax,” we need infirmity offsets!
Interesting study, from Brad Plumer (again):
Test subjects were broken up into two groups, and each group was allowed to pick between pricier and cheaper versions of various items like airline tickets. Group A was told that the more expensive items included the price of a “carbon tax,” whose proceeds would go toward clean-energy development. Group B was told that the costlier items included the price of a “carbon offset,” whose proceeds would go toward clean-energy development. Exact same policy, just different names for each.
You can guess what happened next. In the “offset” group, Democrats, Republicans, and independents all flocked toward the pricier item. They were perfectly happy to pay an extra surcharge to fund CO2 reduction—even Republicans gushed about the benefits of doing so. Not only that, but most of the group supported making the surcharge mandatory. In the “tax” group, however, Democrats were the only ones willing to pay for the costlier item. Republicans in this group were much more inclined to grumble about how much more expensive the tax made things. Labels really do matter.
The Limp Platitudes and Inconsistent Nonsense of Strunk & White
In my first semester of law school, I got into a brief classroom contretemps with an instructor over a matter of grammar. The instructor believed that a sentence of the form ‘there is a controversy about x’ is in the passive voice. Opining that good writing avoids passive constructions whenever possible, she stated her preference for the appalling formulation ‘a controversy exists about x.’ I interjected that ‘there is x’ is not a passive construction, and that there is nothing generally wrong with the passive voice anyway.
The instructor derisively awarded me a “gold star for the day,” trivializing my challenge to her usage dictatorship (while leaving it unclear to all whether she was admitting I was right). She then renewed a prior demand of absolute conformity.
I sat back, withdrew to somewhere inside Wernicke’s area, and silently counted the times she violated her own capricious rules. I may be a snoot, in David Foster Wallace’s sense (pdf), but I am not bullheaded.
This year, 2009, was the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Elements of Style by Strunk & White. Linguist and grammarian Geoffrey Pullum wishes it would rest in peace.
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
Zing! There is a common malady among Americans of the English-class-high-performer type—people who are otherwise attitudinally permissive, but who inexplicably submit themselves to the total embrace of certain stodgy precepts of grammar, syntax, and diction. This malady is viral. And though none can say whether we would suffer from it had this book never been written, it is clear that The Elements of Style sits at the vector origin of this particular memeplex.
More from Pullum:
The book’s contempt for its own grammatical dictates seems almost willful, as if the authors were flaunting the fact that the rules don’t apply to them. But I don’t think they are. Given the evidence that they can’t even tell actives from passives, my guess would be that it is sheer ignorance. They know a few terms, like “subject” and “verb” and “phrase,” but they do not control them well enough to monitor and analyze the structure of what they write.
* * *
What’s wrong is that the grammatical advice proffered in Elements is so misplaced and inaccurate that counterexamples often show up in the authors’ own prose on the very same page.
Read Pullum’s whole piece and be absolved of needless anxiety over the passive voice, split infinitives, and interchangeable use of ‘which’ and ‘that’ to introduce relative clauses. It’s ok. There are no rules against those things. And there never have been. They were the product of the dogmatic and uninformed imaginations of William Strunk and E.B. White, “a pair of idiosyncratic bumblers who can’t even tell when they’ve broken their own misbegotten rules.”
Via Austin Frakt.